


like a needle needs a vein

by r1ker



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 15:31:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6200755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/r1ker/pseuds/r1ker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>when will my fics stop having country music titles. never</p><p>(tim mcgraw and faith hill btw)</p></blockquote>





	like a needle needs a vein

Ray finds himself with Sara one day and it's just the two of them in the lab, her feet tapping against the side of the large table in the middle of the room as she watches him flit about.

 

He can tell just by the way something anxious hangs in the air between them that she's got something to say. Setting down the stack of files he was previously clinging to for dear life as he rearranged a shelf much too high to be tended to efficiently, he says, "If you've got something to say, say it before your head explodes from the tension."

 

Sara makes a sputtering noise, settles her elbows a little firmer on the tabletop. "You and Leonard. That's what I've got to say."

 

"What about him?" Ray asks, still preoccupied with the files long after they've lost their appeal to his mission. That's been a topic he and Sara have danced around for far too long, way longer than it should have been after the gulag. He knows he's got an obligation to give some sort of explanation to the whole scenario – that being the fact he's in love with him – but who is he to be direct?

 

"I see the way you look at him. Really, the way he looked at you when we got you out." Ray swears to himself he's heard this before – someone must have remarked about it with something along the lines of heart-eyes when he was getting overloaded with painkillers – but he nods to let her know he's heard it. "He'd stopped me just after we had gotten you to the medics and he looked sick, gray to the gills with what I'm gonna go ahead and call concern because no one like him takes something like that that seriously if it doesn't affect them. I'm not going to say you're in love with him, that's your choice to make. But you might want to look at how you perceive him before you go back out there." And she's right. Never had a reputation for being wrong in the first place but this, this whole concept is something she seems more skilled in than she let on.

 

"I don't want to," is all Ray can say before it can get too awkward for them to continue on in the same room together. "I don't want to love him. I know he doesn’t want to love me, either. We're stuck in this thing together because we can't find another way out of it. It's inevitable either way and I… I don't know if I can want something like that."

 

"But you have no clue what this is going to be six months down the road," Sara refutes. "That's the problem we all have. We don't have a damn inkling of what continent, time zone, decade, whatever we're going to be in that it's hard to make plans until we're actually there. So you know what we should do? Not rule anything out. Doing this, we're sort of obligated to keep an open mind."

 

Ray's already gone in his own mind, thoughts having risen up into the clouds like they tend to do. What he can see is not a whole lot except for his own blind fantasies, his forehead pressed to Leonard's like they're the only two people inhabiting the planet. Back on earth his stomach does a rough flip, for a second it's as if he can almost feel skin pressing warm against his forehead, eyes boring into his with the promise of something neither one of them can fully comprehend.

 

Maybe this could work. Maybe this concept of them could function.

 

"It's hard to keep an open mind when all of this is constantly thrown at you," he confesses to her. He doesn't think he's entirely in the wrong, only some of it being said out of denial for what this really is. Going into this he was so fixated on the prime directive that he lost sight of what could happen when you're forced into close quarters with people for so long. There hadn't been any doubt in his mind that he could be all business, work and not play, that soon his mind saw it as an opportunity to go against the goal. "It's so hard, Sara. And I'm tired."

 

"I know," she says, one hand finding his where they're gripping each other on the table. "And you don't need to go at it alone. We're here with you, but most importantly Leonard is." She looks away with her eyes crinkling at the corners, trying and failing to hold back a smile. "He might not act like it sometimes but if he isn't smitten then everything I've said is a lie. Tonight he and Mick are in for the night but he'll be looking to get out of his quarters. Bring him dinner, eat with him. Do something that's not going to have the two of you cooped up apart and worrying about this for so long."

 

So Ray does. He thanks Sara for what she's done, being the final push to send him over a ledge he's been edging close to for about a month now, and he goes off in search of what her something she told him to do is. Somewhere in the waverider's kitchen he unearths a pizza that could be edible if he nukes it long enough, so with that burning a neat circle of his palms and onto the joints of his fingers he sets out for Leonard and Mick's quarters.

 

He hesitates before knocking on the heavy metal door. The pizza sizzling in his grip says otherwise and soon he raps his knuckle on the door purely out of the goal to find somewhere to set it down. Leonard answers with seconds to spare before Ray drops the pizza out of agony, and Ray tries to act like his flesh wasn't being withered away by their dinner by responding to Leonard's usual scowl with a grin of hope. "Hi. I come bearing pizza."

 

"I'm gonna let you in just this once because you've got food on you," Leonard mumbles as he stands out of the way just enough for Ray to edge between him and the door, the table inside in his line of sight. The pizza slips from his hold and he bites back a noise of pain, rubbing at his hands.

 

Leonard looks at him with an eyebrow raised. All Ray says, "That was a really hot pizza. Seriously, go ahead and wrap a paw around the bottom of that thing." The color that starts to rise beneath Leonard's cheeks lets Ray knows this is off to an awkward, but good start. One he'll take. He tears off a piece and so does Leonard, and their plates are sheets of paper from what Ray hopes isn't a notebook with mission details. He tries to play off the fact that he hadn't eaten since breakfast by waiting in strategic increments to go for more but Leonard looks right past that, is well into his third slice when Ray still working on a second.

 

"Sara wanted me to come by," he says to Leonard in the hopes of it being a conversation starter. It seems to work in that Leonard looks up at him with that eyebrow that was previously done into a slight arch. "We got to talking and you came up. She was right about after me getting out of the gulag… you're not okay about some parts of it. And I don't blame you."

 

"I don't like seeing people get hurt that don't deserve it," Leonard says and Ray's taken aback by just how angry he sounds, not at Ray but the ones who perpetrated it. "You don't deserve to have someone hurt you like that. I heard about it, and I thank God I didn't have to see it because if I did, I'd be speaking to you from behind plate glass." Ray swallows what he really wants to say around another mouthful of pizza. That being, _I could jump you right now and Mick would just have to deal with it if he came back early._ He doesn't let that come to the surface of course, and instead nods at Leonard in understanding as the pizza is finished off between the two of them.

 

After they're done Leonard throws caution to the wind, throws his feet up onto the bed with Ray left sitting at the foot of the bed. Ray tamps down the urge to put one hand to Leonard's knee, remind himself through touch that it's just the two of them in the room now. Leonard looks to be about half gone by the time Ray decides this is enough.

 

"I don’t blame you for anything," Ray lets him know like that hasn't been determined between them by their unwillingness to address it firsthand. It's understood and not spoken, and that drives Ray nuts when things aren't verbalized. So now they are. "I blame you for not letting me know sooner that you care more than you like to let on. That gives me an impression you know better than to make."

 

"And what impression would that be, Raymond?" Leonard mumbles because he's still feigning off sleep alongside what Ray has to say to him.

 

"That you love me. Always have and always will." Leonard's fully awake now, easing up to rest the upper half of his weight on his elbows. He looks like he's been found with his hand in whatever cookie jar gets put out there when you find out what bothered you bothered you for all the right reasons. "It annoys you that you love me. You've never loved another thing in your life that wasn't the rush of living. Now that it's got a form, got shape and thought, you have no clue what to do with it. And if I had to place a bet, I'd say it scares you."

 

"You're damn right it scares me," Leonard says with more alertness that he's had this whole night. Ray moves to let him sit next to him on the edge of the mattress. Ray catches his eyes for a second, just long enough to pick up on the fear that runs through them. It's not out of danger but out of concern. "I do all this for me, and some of it's not the best for someone else to be a bystander in. The things I have seen, and done, are things you should never have to be a third party to. So yes, I'm scared. Not for me or what could happen to me if I give into it, but for you if you let me do this."

 

Ray's at a loss for words for a second he sits there with his face angled away from Leonard's, regarding with utmost intent the concrete floor, until he lets his hand find one of Leonard's where it's gripping his pants almost to the point of pain. He holds it between his, ignores how it starts out awkward for what Leonard has just said makes any point of intimacy afterwards hard to come by. Leonard's first four fingers curl around his thumb, give a tight squeeze. Ray looks back and sees what he had dwelled on earlier in the night.

 

"I'm a big boy, I don't need someone to be scared for me," Ray whispers to him like they've got an audience and not an entire hall in the waverider to themselves. "Don't do that, don't claim fear. At least, don't do it with me for an excuse." He means for the last part to hit home but not so hard as for Leonard to grab his face in both hands and kiss him to an inch of losing his balance.

 

Ray's shoulders fall, his back loses the sharp curve it had made in defense to Leonard as his guard comes down completely. The hands on his face make it possible to tip his head back, hair slipping between Leonard's fingers causing his mouth to fall open between his. Ray lets out a breath, has Leonard snatch it up just as soon as it's left his lungs. Pulling back Leonard rests his forehead against Ray's, chest huffing quietly for breath.

 

"You're not an excuse, you're a reason," Leonard says quietly to him. Ray's too long gone in trying to catch his breath to understand the significance so he blinks slowly, thumbs pressing idly at Leonard's chin. "You've always been the reason. And I'll be damned if I didn't understand it." Ray wraps both of his arms around Leonard's neck at that, he's fully aware what it's like to not comprehend something completely beyond your control. And for the first time in months he knows.

**Author's Note:**

> when will my fics stop having country music titles. never
> 
> (tim mcgraw and faith hill btw)


End file.
